The CNN Interview

I keep returning to Nate Silver's Feburary advice to the White House, in which he warns

[H]e's losing now and there's no plan to fix the problems other than hoping that the polls are wrong[.]

I'm starting to think that Silver, like Alan Dershowitz, is a highly intelligent traditional Democrat who's sincerely trying to think his position through, and it's a fascinating process to watch. Let's revisit his February position on Biden interviews:

Biden’s doing a lot fewer interviews than even the media-hostile Trump. And when he does them, his performance is still just mediocre.

Again, he recommended that Biden turn things around:

Over the course of the next several weeks [i.e, in March}, Biden should do four lengthy sitdown interviews with “non-friendly” sources. “Non-friendly” doesn't mean hostile: nonpartisan reporters with a track record of asking tough questions would work great. A complete recording of the interviews should be made public. The interviews ought to include a mix of different media (e.g. television and print) and journalistic perspectives.

. . . This really isn't too much to ask. These are the sorts of interviews that every other recent president has done. I admit that I'm asking Biden to pack in several in a row, but he has to make up for lost time. And the timing is urgent because he and his inner circle have to make sure that he's really up for a second term and that this is the best option for Democrats. If Biden was willing to take five hours to speak with Hur, he ought to to take five hours for this.

So he's implying that these interviews, to turn Joe's prospects around, should be roughly an hour long, and there should be maybe four of them. Well, even though the timing was urgent in February, Joe and his handlers haven't done what Silver thought would be needed. Finally on Wednesday, months behind schedule, Joe gave an interview -- but news of it didn't break until Thursday morning, when Stormy Daniels's resumed cross-examination dominated the breathless headlines. It might as well not have happened -- but by Thursday evening, the New York Post editorialized,

The White House rarely allows President Biden to sit down for interviews, and Wednesday’s chat with CNN’s Erin Burnett shows why.

In a brief 17 minutes, Biden told 15 lies — nearly a lie a minute.

From whoppers about the economy to prevarications on Israel, Biden spun a fantasyland of a presidency that voters know is false.

Once people tore themselves away from Stormy Daniels, which did little but keep the ongoing focus on Trump, giving him yet another day of free media, they learned of Joe's claims that inflation was 9% under Trump or that people are reading the wrong polls.

The president, comparing his policies with those of former President Trump, rejected polls that show that voters trust Trump on the economy more than they trust Biden.

During an interview with CNN, the president was hard pressed to construct an accessible story about how his economic policies are affecting real Americans.

“We’ve already turned it around,” Biden said from Wisconsin. “The polling data has been wrong all along.”

David Axelrod seems to be another Democrat who's trying to recalibrate.

On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “OutFront,” CNN Senior Political Commentator and former Obama Adviser David Axelrod. . . . stated, “I don’t understand this. I don’t understand, all these months later, he went — I thought they spent $25 million, mistakenly, last fall, touting Bidenomics and making the same argument that the President’s making here. It is absolutely true, the world was plunged into an economic crisis and America was plunged into an economic crisis by the pandemic, and we’ve come back faster than almost any other country. . . but that’s not the way people are experiencing the economy. They’re experiencing it through the lens of the cost of living. . . . I think he’s making a terrible mistake. It may not be — if he doesn’t win this race, it may not be Donald Trump that beats him, it may be his own pride.”

It's fascinating that Axelrod, whom Wikipedia says was raised in a liberal Jewish family, should attribute Biden's failings to "pride", which is more often addressed as a sin in a Roman Catholic context. According to Britannica,

Pride, in Roman Catholic theology, one of the seven deadly sins, considered by some to be the gravest of all sins. In the theological sense, pride is defined as an excessive love of one’s own excellence. As a deadly sin, pride is believed to generate other sins and further immoral behaviour and is countered by the heavenly virtue of humility.

But Axelrod's assessment is insightful. It reminds me of the Dunning-Kruger effect, "a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities". It's hard to avoid thinking something like this is a basic mover in Biden's character, and I think it's a pretty good explanation for why so much has been going wrong on his watch.

The interview strongly suggests that he's in a bubble, the polls are wrong, he's already turned the economy around, corporations are gouging, and Israel is targeting civilians. And he's going to be stubborn about this -- he isn't listening to reasonable people on his side like Nate Silver, David Axelrod, and Alan Dershowitz. This is disturbing and dangerous.

Dershowitz Update

Yesterday, in response to news that the Biden administration had "paused" certain arms shipments to Israel in an attempt to hold back Israel's intent to go into Rafah to eliminate the threat from Hamas, I quoted Alan Dershowitz's statement from back in March, "If you stop supplying ammunition and arms to Israel and deny them the right to defend themselves, you have crossed my red line." I'd been waiting, as apparently many others have, for Dershowitz's reaction to this latest development. It's come, at least for now, in yesterday's Dershow podcast, which is linked above.

If I had to vote today, I would not vote for President Biden

. . . For those who have asked me, has my red line been crossed, this is the red line, and if it is crossed by the Biden administration, I will abide by my commitment and not support those who have crossed my red line, and I'm sure it's a red line for many of you as well. So I hope it hasn't been crossed, and I hope there's still a possibility that Israel can remain a bipartisan issue, but it's moving away from that, and that's a very dangerous development, both for the United States and for Israel.

His position, as first articulated in March, was tentative. He followed "you have crossed my red line" then with, "I hope that doesn't happen," and his statement in the podcast is still, "So I hope it hasn't been crossed". This is not an earth-shakng move by any means. On the other hand, elsewhere in the podcast, he mentions that he talks on the phone with Prime Minister Netanyahu several times a week, apparently without fully understanding that Netanyahu is Biden's bête noire, second only to Trump.

There can be no question that in Biden's mind, a policy that helps Israel is one that helps Netanyahu, and its hard to avoid thinking that Netanyahu, the longest-serving prime minister in Israel's history, has been a far more successful politician than Biden -- deep down, Biden knows this, and he hates Netanyahu for it. (This is also why Republicans like Romney and Jeb Bush hate Trump, by the way.) I don't think Dershowitz has fully wrapped his head around this yet, but he's getting there.

Biden's remarks to Erin Burnett in last night's CNN interview indicate that his thinking is at best muddled:

Biden described warning Netanyahu about the risks of becoming bogged down in Gaza, drawing parallels to the American experience in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“I said to Bibi, ‘Don’t make the same mistake we made in America. We wanted to get bin Laden. We’ll help you get Sinwar,’” he said, referring to the Hamas leader in Gaza. “It made sense to get bin Laden; it made no sense to try and unify Afghanistan. It made no sense in my view to engage in thinking that in Iraq they had a nuclear weapon.”

But Biden supported the Iraq war in 2002, despite his later claims that he didn't:

Joe Biden has claimed that despite voting to authorize military force against Iraq in 2002, he opposed the Iraq war from “the moment” it began. That’s not accurate, and Biden now says he misspoke.

. . . Biden wasn’t against using military action against Iraq to force Iraq to give up weapons of mass destruction (which, as it turned out, it did not have).

The day the war commenced, Biden told CNN: “There’s a lot of us who voted for giving the president the authority to take down Saddam Hussein if he didn’t disarm. And there are those who believe, at the end of the day, even though it wasn’t handled all that well, we still have to take him down.”

Biden in last night's remarks also claimed it "made sense to get bin Laden", but he consistently opposed doing this when he was vice president. In a 2020 exchange with Peter Doocy, he denied it:

Doocy responded, “Didn’t you tell President Obama not to go after bin Laden that day?”

To which Biden responded: “No, I didn’t. I didn’t.”

Biden’s description of his advice to Obama changed between 2012 and 2015; two of his accounts were contradictory. He said in 2012 that he had advised Obama “don’t go” with the raid before obtaining more information. He then said in 2015 that he had not uttered this “don’t go” opinion.

Former top officials in the Obama administration have written in their memoirs that Biden was “against the operation,” that he was “firmly in favor of waiting for more information,” and that he was concerned about the risks of a raid.

The problem continues to be that Joe, as Robert Gates has said, is consistently wrong, and in fact, right or wrong, he'll do what's expedient, which he's always done. Here's the problem, which Dershowitz is working hard not to confront:

Why, you may ask, are the campus and other protesters inspired to protest in increasing numbers, and with greater violence and aggressiveness?

The answer is that the protesters believe their protests are working.

When @POTUS Biden withholds weapons from @Israel a few weeks… https://t.co/9lsXKI1joN

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) May 8, 2024

Itr's hard not to conclude that Biden is dangerous at this point. He's playing footsie with the far left, trying to avoid offending them by supporting Israel, while hoping people like Dershowitz won't lose patience with his equivocations. But the bottom line is he's hoping he can keep on being lucky, and nothing will go south in the Middle East before the election. This isn't a strategy.

In Other News

Michael LeBron, who posts as Lionel on his YouTube channel, summed up yesterday's New York trial: As the Skank Tanks. I can't possibly top that, and otrher things are happening, so I'll mention just three of them.

First, according to Politico,

The Biden administration is holding up shipments of two types of Boeing-made precision bombs to send a political message to Israel, according to a U.S. official and six other people with knowledge of the deliberations.

The U.S. has yet to sign off on a pending sale of Boeing’s Joint Direct Attack Munitions — both the munitions and kits that convert them to smart weapons — and Small Diameter Bombs, according to six industry and congressional sources with knowledge of the discussions.

While the Biden administration has not formally denied the potential sale, it is essentially taking action through inaction — holding off on approvals and other aspects of the weapons transfer process — to send a message to Israel, a U.S. administration official familiar with the process told POLITICO.

Meanwhile,

[A]n Israeli official told NBC News there is deep frustration in the Israeli government over the decision. The official added that tensions had already been running high after Israel felt the U.S. allowed it to be blindsided by Hamas’ announcement earlier this week that it was accepting a version of a cease-fire proposal.

. . . Hamas on Monday said it had accepted the terms of a proposal brokered by Egypt and Qatar, but Israel said it was “far from” meeting its demands. Negotiators have been trying to resolve disagreements over phasing, among other differences over a truce deal that would secure the release of hostages, according to another senior administration official.

. . . Facing mounting criticism at home and abroad, Biden has increasingly clashed with Netanyahu over his military's conduct in Gaza and his insistence on an operation in Rafah that Israel says is necessary to eliminate Hamas but which aid groups fear would be catastrophic for civilians in southern Gaza.

As the news of the weapons hold has emerged in the past couple of days, I keep going back to statments from Alan Dershowitz that I've posted here. For instance, more than a month ago, I quoted his statement on YouTube,

If you stop supplying ammunition and arms to Israel and deny them the right to defend themselves, you have crossed my red line. I hope that doesn't happen. I now have a more open mind than I ever thought I would have about whom I will vote for in this election. The Democratic Party cannot take me, the people who listen to me, the people who vote the way I do, they can't take us for granted, sorry.

It looks like Biden is coming closer and closer to crossing Dershowitz's red line, and the problem is that it's also becoming clearer and clearer that Biden's judgment is in question -- whether a medical diagnosis needs to be invoked or not, it seems to me that there's reason simply to question whether he's under the influence of alcohol or possibly overmedicated. But the people around him, especially Vice President Harris, are no better.

Vice President Kamala Harris dodged reporters on the campaign trail Monday, creating another awkward moment as she left a restaurant in Detroit Michigan.

Harris made a campaign stop at Joe Louis Southern Kitchen to order food, but did not let reporters join her into the establishment.

As she walked briskly out of the restaurant with what looked to be a bag of takeout food, one reporter shouted a question about the details surrounding Gaza terror group Hamas accepting a ceasefire.

Shrimp and grits. You wanted to know? Shrimp and grits,' Harris said quickly without stopping and jumping into a waiting SUV.

Clearly she's being counseled to avoid the cackling laugh with which she would have answered such questions up to a few weeks ago, but "shrimp and grits" isn't any sort of improvement. A normal politician or bureaucrat at the cabinet level would have had the instinct to say something adult-sounding like can't comment on ongoing blah blah blah, but so far, Kamala hasn't even reached that level -- it's just shrimp and grits.

Another big development is

United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida Judge Aileen Cannon postponed former President Donald Trump’s classified records trial indefinitely for discovery and pre-trial motions.

It would have started on May 20.

This makes it highly unlikely that the case will come to trial before the election. However, instead of the trial beginning on May 20, the Judge has instead scheduled a number of hearings on pretrial motions to begin on that date, extending into June.

Oh damn this is too good.

Cannon set hearings on key motions including selective prosecution, unlawful of appointment of Special Counsel, and what Jack Smith really hoped to avoid--a hearing on the scope of the prosecution team incl Biden White House.

Almost an extended mini… pic.twitter.com/aTs3m9mYRZ

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) May 7, 2024

Several of these hearings will be on defense motions to dismiss the case.

On top of that, just this morning,

The Georgia Court of Appeals on Wednesday agreed to review a decision by a Fulton County Superior Court judge who declined to disqualify District Attorney Fani Willis and her office from the 2020 election case against former President Donald Trump because of a personal relationship Willis had with a prosecutor.

. . . The defendants submitted a formal application to appeal McAfee's decision in March, and the appeals court had 45 days to decide whether to take up the matter. Trump could ask the Georgia Court of Appeals to pause proceedings while it considers the disqualification issue.

The court's decision to grant Trump's appeal will likely delay the start of any trial, though no date has been set for it to begin. The case in Fulton County is one of four Trump is facing as he mounts a third bid for the White House.

It was within the appeals court's authority simply not to hear the case, which is significant in itself, since the court has at least seen merit in the appellants' arguments, but beyond that, the developments in Florida and now Georgia have effectively removed two of the four lawfare cases Trump had faced from any likelihood they can be tried before November.

Joe Biden As Of 2022

I happened to be watching a program about space travel on TV over the weekend, and it included the clip above, which I was also able to find on YouTube. It shows Joe receiving a NASA briefing on the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope on July 11, 2022, less than two years ago. Compared to the Joe Biden we've come to know more recently, I think it's remarkable: he's engaged, on point, speaking clearly, not slurring, not mumbling, getting all the words right. At 1:34:

. . . light where stars were born, and from where they die. Light from the oldest galaxies, the oldest documented light in the history of the universe, from over 13 billion -- let me say that again -- 13 billion years ago. It's hard to even fathom. Tomorrow when this image is shared with the world, it'll be a historic moment.

Clearly this was written for him. But there are also Bidenisms, the fascination with a big number, the need to rephrase the remark about light -- but some of these words are tonguetwisters, Joe has never been great at enunciation, yet he gets them all out clearly. In far too many episodes throughout his presidency, he's struggled to read from the teleprompter, yet here he's able to do it quite well, and in a relatively minor forum.

At 2:30, the camera backs off to show him seated at a desk, facing a NASA screen and watching pictures apparently with an audience of NASA munchkins, which is an unusual setting, and I'm assuming that the seated position is some sort of planned accomodation by his handlers, possibly to keep him from getting tired out during his speech -- but whatever it is, we've got to allow that it's working here.

This brings me to my puzzle: what did they do right this time that they've almost never been able to do before or since? The clip below, for instance, outlines Joe's biggest gaffes in 2021, the year before his July 11, 2022 NASA appearance:

In fact, another video that claimed to show Joe slurring during a speech on July 4, 2022, just a week before the NASA clip, generated controversy. Since then, of course, it's become much harder to claim that videos showing Joe slurring have been doctored. Still, 2022 was late in the game -- how did they get Joe to put on a near-flawless peformance for the NASA ceremony, if even for less than ten minutes? And the clip below is apparently from April of that year:

From the start:

We're gonna seize their yachts, their luxury homes, their ill-begotten gains -- Putin's klep-to-cra-cy -- yeah. Klep -- the guys who are in the kleptocracies. Heheheheheh.

This brings me back to the point I've frequently made here, that hypercorrection, overly careful speech, and slurring are signs that someone is drunk. For a cop on traffic patrol, they're probable cause for sobriety testing. And if Joe is, as he showed during those 2022 episodes, able to turn the intoxicated speech on and off, what's happening there? At the NASA peformance, something was different. If it was some new meds, why don't they give those to him all the time? If they were able to keep him away from alcohol, how did they do that, and why do they seem to be so seldom successful?

I'm back to The King's Speech, where the speech therapist Lionel Logue is able to demonstrate to George VI that there are circumstances where he can speak without stammering -- when he's singing, when he can't hear himself talking, or when he's shouting cusswords. All of these things suggest causes and cures, even for heads of state. I still wonder if Joe's handlers could keep him off the sauce, there might be a big improvement. Joe, of course, has repeatedly claimed he's never had a drink. And Uncle Bosey was eaten by cannibals.

All I can surmise is there's a lot we aren't being told.

Alissa Heinerscheid, Dylan Mulvaney, And The Helter Skelter Strategy

In the middle of last night, it was revealed to me in a dream that Alissa Heinerscheid, the independently wealthy Harvard legacy who achieved her 15 minutes of fame when she made Dylan Mulvaney the spokestrans for Bud Ligfht a year ago, is actually the social theorist behind the current wave of campus pogroms -- and this despite her own Jewish heritage -- with maybe a little bit of help from Charles Manson.

Hear me out. I began to puzzle this through when I mentioned in a recent post that unlike 1968, when campus unrest was paralleled by riots in the ghettos, there's so far been no equivalence between student grievances and those of the African-American community. If fact, Al Sharpton has expressed deep skepticism of the pro-Palestine protests. There's no intersectional resonance. Instead, over the weeend, we had these stories:

President Joe Biden has been dogged for months by pro-Palestinian protesters calling him “Genocide Joe” — but some of the groups behind the demonstrations receive financial backing from philanthropists pushing hard for his reelection.

The donors include some of the biggest names in Democratic circles: Soros, Rockefeller and Pritzker, according to a POLITICO analysis.

Two of the organizers supporting the protests at Columbia University and on other campuses are Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Both are supported by the Tides Foundation, which is seeded by Democratic megadonor George Soros[.]

. . . . Another notable Democratic donor whose philanthropy has helped fund the protest movement is David Rockefeller Jr., who sits on the board of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. In 2022, the fund gave $300,000 to the Tides Foundation; according to nonprofit tax forms, Tides has given nearly $500,000 over the past five years to Jewish Voice for Peace, which explicitly describes itself as anti-Zionist.

Several other groups involved in pro-Palestinian protests are backed by a foundation funded by Susan and Nick Pritzker, heir to the Hyatt Hotel empire — and supporters of Biden and numerous Democratic campaigns, including $6,600 to the Biden Victory Fund a few months ago and more than $300,000 during the 2020 campaign.

But this isn't the same thing as radical chic, a 1970s phenomenon:

The phrase "radical chic" originated in a 1970 New York article by Tom Wolfe, titled "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's". . . . In the essay, Wolfe used the term to satirize composer Leonard Bernstein and his friends for their absurdity in hosting a fundraising party for the Black Panthers—an organization whose members, activities, and goals were clearly incongruous with those of Bernstein's elite circle. Wolfe's concept of radical chic was intended to lampoon individuals (particularly social elites like the jet set) who endorsed leftist radicalism merely to affect worldliness, assuage white guilt, or garner prestige, rather than to affirm genuine political convictions.

The current wave of campus pogroms is different. So far, none of the Pritzkers or Rockefellers has appeared in a keffiyeh to express public solidarity with the Gazans. This isn't about affectation -- these people are working assiduously behind the scenes. According to the Wall Street Journal,

[T]he political tactics underlying some of the demonstrations were the result of months of training, planning and encouragement by longtime activists and left-wing groups.

Breitbart News continues,

National Students for Justice in Palestine (NJSP), which is involved in the encampments, has been receiving funding from a group in New York called Wespac:

Wespac denied being involved in the encampments or coordinating in any way with the participants in the campus protests.

However, NGO Monitor also listed Wespac among the non-governmental organizations involved in “orchestrating” the protests: “WESPAC Foundation, a Westchester, New York-based organization registered with the IRS as a 501(c)(3) non-profit, serves as the fiscal sponsor for National SJP.”

. . . WESPAC serves as fiscal sponsor for some of the NGOs responsible for antisemitism on campuses, including Students for Justice in Palestine and Within Our Lifetime. WESPAC also fulfills this role for U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN), Adalah-NY, and the Palestinian Youth Movement USA.

WESPAC’s sources of income are mostly unknown. Public records reveal a handful of foundational donors, including from large donor-advised charities that further obscure the original donors.

We may also infer that the Pritzkers and similarly aligned well-known donors like Laurene Powell Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, are advocating the Biden administration's current policy of discouraging Israel from conducting an effective campaign against Hamas, as well as the new proposal to resettle Palestinians from Gaza into the US, which will simply create an additional militant interest group that will further roil domestic politics.

Of course, some of these donors, like George Soros, the Pritzkers, and Mark Zuckerberg, are of Jewish heritage, although they don't appear to be observant. Alissa Heinerscheid went one step farther and became an Episcopalian, also of the less observant sort. None appears to have any particular reason to support Israel, which leads me to what I think is the social theory behind their current geopolitical alignment, the Helter Skelter scenario,

an apocalyptic vision that was supposedly embraced by Charles Manson and members of his so-called Family.

. . . Manson prophesied what he called Helter Skelter, an apocalyptic war that would arise from racial tensions between black and white people.  

. . . In the vision's logic, black men would thus be deprived of the white women whom the political changes of the 1960s had made sexually available to them; they would lash out in violent crimes against whites. . . . When frightened whites, according to Watkins and Tex Watson, would retaliate with a murderous rampage, militant blacks would exploit it to provoke a war of near-extermination between racist and non-racist whites over the treatment of blacks. In the wake of that, black militants would arise to finish off the few white survivors and to kill off all non-blacks.

. . . In this holocaust, . . the members of the enlarged [Manson] Family would have little to fear; they would wait out the war in a secret city underneath Death Valley, a city they'd reach through a hole in the ground. Upon the war's conclusion, they would be the only remaining whites. Emerging from underground, they would rule the blacks, who, having "completed the white man's karma", would want no longer to kill.

Although the current pro-Hamas encampments are notionally made up of wealthy and entitled Ivy Leaguers, these people are useful idiots who've been set up by trained organizers, and the inchoate goal of the super-wealthy elite who are funding the effort is to replace the US middle class (which is far too Jewish) with a new proletariat imported from the Third World and bring down the structure of Western society, at which point Laurene Powell Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, the Pritzkers, Soros pere et fils, Jeff Bezos, the Rockefellers, the Kennedys (sans RFK Jr) and Alissa Heinerscheid will emerge from their secret city underneath Death Valley as the only remaining whites, and they'll be able to rule the people of color, who will become a docile underclass that no longer harbors revolutionary aspirations.

I'm really trying to figure out where I've gone wrong here, but I'm wondering if this may have something to do with the lack of enthusiasm for the current campus unrest among African-Americans.

If You Needed Proof The Lizard People Are Nervous

I've mentioned here several times Nate Silver's advice to the Biden campaign last Febsruary

Biden can still win. But he's losing now and there's no plan to fix the problems other than hoping that the polls are wrong or that voters look at the race differently when they have more time to focus on it. Neither is so implausible and it is likely to be a close race. But even the most optimistic Democrats, if you read between the lines, are really arguing that Democrats could win despite Biden and not because of him.

The single biggest problem Silver saw is Biden's age, and the campaign needed to do something:

A lot of commentators that I respect have pointed out that Biden ought to do more public events that would help to allay public doubts about his mental sharpness. The problem is, one can infer the reason that Biden is not doing them — namely that the White House comms team is rational and has inferred that the cost of doing them outweighs the benefits because Biden is too likely to come across poorly.

His solution to the problem was a careful balance of appearances that would maximize Joe's ability to look mentally sharp while minimizing the risk that he would self-destruct in yet another gaffe. I can't help thinking of those books that tell you how to beat the odds playing the slots in Vegas, which boil down to saying just get lucky. Two months after Silver gave his advice, all we can point to is Uncle Bosey.

It's starting to look as though last week's polls showing Trump widening his lead were a wake-up call to the lizard people, in other words, the big-money Democrat oligarchs, Laurene Powell Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and so forth. If the Biden campaign was taking some version of Nate Silver lite, it's now backed off from even that, according to NBC:

As President Joe Biden ramps up his re-election effort, his campaign is also scaling back how much he says on the trail, part of a larger new strategy to hone a sharper message he’ll take into the general election, according to Biden aides.

. . . The approach also has the appearance of a strategy aimed at minimizing the potential for Biden to make mistakes in a razor-close election. Some of Biden’s verbal missteps have occurred when he’s talking at length, veers off the prepared text or answers a reporter’s question when that wasn’t part of the plan.

. . . Some of Biden’s advisers have been pushing for him to go even further in attempts to sharpen his public appearances. They’ve argued for the president to replace prepared campaign remarks entirely, in favor of less scripted retail stops and punchier, digital content where he speaks directly to the camera.

The implication in the story is that this change in strategy has already been under way:

The president has in recent weeks made notable efforts at brevity, in both official and campaign events. Biden’s remarks this past week on the campus protests over the war in the Gaza Strip were just four minutes long. His high-profile speech on abortion rights in Florida last week was just 14 minutes long. And his speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner lasted just 10 minutes — half as long as the year before.

I assume this is part of the line they're giving the lizard people, or the lizard people's reps, when they call -- don't worry, we're on top of it. Uncle Bosey was two weeks ago. But the problem is that the emperor is the emperor:

Still, the effort appears to be a work in progress. At an infrastructure event in North Carolina on Thursday, Biden often deviated from the script in the teleprompter to add some political flourishes and spoke for more than 20 minutes.

Current and former Biden officials have long noted that the president sees value in delivering longer speeches, citing his interest in communicating comprehensively with Americans on policy matters. And aides said in the weeks ahead Biden will, at strategic moments, deliver some longer, issue-specific speeches aimed at drawing a contrast with his Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump. Most recently he gave an economic policy speech in Scranton, Pennsylvania, that lasted about a half-hour.

Except that the economic policy speech in Scranton was the one where he talked about Uncle Bosey and giving the dirty pictures that ladies sent him to the Secret Service. And even if you cut that stuff out, you're still going to get the slurring, the hypercorrection, the random pauses, the mumbling, and the malapropisms. And they want him in smaller venues in large part because they don't want the constant visuals of the big guy wandering off the stage or shaking hands with people who aren't there.

But smaller-form events are of little help. The scene below, at a coffee store in Emmaus, PA, shows Joe closely convoyed by handlers and Secret Service, his manner, insofar as anyone can see it, wooden and detached:

Notice how the line from both Nate Silver in February and NBC now is that it's going to be a "close race" or "razor thin". But this is whistling past the graveyard, these efforts to portray the emperor as mentally sharp and in charge haven't been working, even though his handlers have been fully aware of the situation all along -- indeed, at least since 2020, although Obama and his people likely knew the score well before then. My money is still on the likelihood that after this year's election, there will be leaks from insiders that the problem all along was Joe's alcohol consumption, and this was never anything new.

But the lizard people are clearly getting nervous.

The Past Week's Polls

As of mid-April, the conventional wisdom had been that Biden was closing the gap with Trump. But as of this past Sunday, things changed, first with CNN:

Donald Trump continues to hold an advantage over President Joe Biden as the campaign – and the former president’s criminal trial – move forward, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. And in the coming rematch, opinions about the first term of each man vying for a second four years in the White House now appear to work in Trump’s favor, with most Americans saying that, looking back, Trump’s term as president was a success, while a broad majority says Biden’s has so far been a failure.

Trump’s support in the poll among registered voters holds steady at 49% in a head-to-head matchup against Biden, the same as in CNN’s last national poll on the race in January, while Biden’s stands at 43%, not significantly different from January’s 45%.

This, of course, is a six-point lead, although this is in a theoretical national popular vote match, which doesn't take place in the real world. However. this has turned out to be the low point for Trump in the week's resuilts. As of yesterday,

Despite being on trial in New York City, former President Donald Trump has widened his lead over President Joe Biden during the past month.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that, in a three-way contest between Biden, Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 46% of Likely U.S. Voters would choose Trump, 36% would vote for Biden and nine percent (9%) would vote for Kennedy. In April, Trump led by 6 points, 44% to 38% for Biden, with RFK Jr. at 10%.

The Washington Examiner provides some analysis:

While the [Rasmussen] analysis does not mention why Trump is surging, the results come during a week when he has used a New York City hush money trial against him to give daily press conferences outside the court that the media, especially left-leaning TV outlets such as CNN, cover. What’s more, he has been more focused on his second term agenda and telling MAGA what he wants to do should he return to the White House.

Biden, meanwhile, has been rocked by the economy, inflation, and the public’s anger over paying high prices. He has also been hurt politically by the raging campus protests in response to his Middle East policies.

The big point this take misses is that the campus pogroms are unique. A writer named Michael A Cohen (not the former Trump lawyer) points out on MSNBC,:

the increasingly omnipresent talk about how the pro-Palestinian anti-war protests roiling American college campuses today bear similarity to those protests 56 years ago opposing the war in Vietnam. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., even suggested that the war in Gaza “may be Biden’s Vietnam.”

. . . Not only is the war in Gaza not a primary issue of concern for voters; it doesn’t even crack the top 10. Indeed, according to the recent Harvard poll of voters aged 18-29, Israel/Palestine ranked 15th out of 16 on their list of the most important issues facing America. (Oddly the only issue that ranked lower was student debt.)

. . . As CNN’s polling guru Harry Enten recently pointed out, Biden’s declining support among young voters predates the war in Gaza — and the war has had practically no effect on 2024 presidential polling.

This suggests a basic tone-deafness in the Biden campaign. which seems to want to triangulate over Gaza and Israel in hope of keeping pro-Palestine voters on board, where this doesn't really make a difference. The MSNBC piece continues, "Perhaps Biden will pay a price with Arab voters in the crucial swing state of Michigan." But another poll from this past week makes that issue moot:

Donald Trump is beating Joe Biden by 15 points in Michigan six months before the presidential election, one poll has shown.

According to a Kaplan Strategies survey of 804 people, the former president is leading the incumbent by 51 percent to 36 percent in the key battleground state. The margin of error for the survey was 3.5 percentage points.

Most other polls show a closer race, although few of them show Biden ahead, and as of today, the Real Clear Politics average shows him ahead by 1.2 points.

It seems to me that comparisons among the 1968 urban and college riots, the 2020 George Floyd riots, and the 2024 college pogroms all miss an important point. There were diosorders over the Viet Nam war in 1968, both on campuses and in Chicago at the Democrat convention, but there were also urban riots following the King assassination in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, and Kansas City.

In other words, there was an important race and class component to the general unrest, and it was an early manifestation of the alliance between the urban underclass and the Ivy League upper crust -- keep in mind that many in the leadership of the Students for a Democratic Society had at minimum prosperous backgrounds, but Thomas Ayers's father was the wealthy CEO of Commonwealth Edison.

The 2020 George Floyd riots mirrored this alliance, with upper middle class students declaring protest zones in cities like Seattle in alliance with African-American protesters, and Black Livea Matter lawn posters appeared in many prosperous suburban neighborhoods.

What's unique about the 2024 campus pro-Palestine riots is that urban African-American support has been minimal. Notably.

MSNBC host Al Sharpton compared anti-Israel protests to the events of Jan. 6 on Thursday and said Democrats were losing the “moral high ground” by not calling out the demonstrations on college campuses.

. . . “ How do the Democrats, how do all of us on that side say Jan. 6th was wrong if you can have the same pictures going on on college campuses, you lose the moral high ground,” Sharpton said.

This is turning out to be a boutique issue that isn't uniting the left. The big subtext in 1968 was the draft, which affected young men across the board, who didn't want to be conscripted for cannon fodder. As it happened, upper middle class college students were most aggrieved, as it offended their sense of entitlement, but working-class whites and African-Americans were just as much affected. Nixon quickly defused the problem by winding down the war and instituting the draft lottery.

But in 2024, there isn't the equivalent class alliance, and as the polling above suggests, Gaza and Palestine aren't issues on which many in the electorate are basing their decisions.

Instead, there are two big factors. One hasn't been acknowledged as much as it should be: the more Trump goes to court, the higher he rises in the polls. It's beginning to emerge that with rthe New York criminal trial, he isn't just holding his own against Biden with a lead of a few points, he's starting to widen the gap. As Jonathan Turley put it in a different context, Alvin Bragg is Trump's best lawyer.

The second issue is that the public has now grown plenty familiar -- indeed, overfamiliar -- with Joe Biden. The electorate is tired of the stumbles, the slurring, the malapropisms, the repeated embroidered stories of Uncle Bosey and such. The investigations of the Biden family grift haven't revealed bombshells, but the overwhelming impression on the public has been that he's shallow, venal, weak, vindictive, and lazy. I doon't see how he can turn this around. He is what he is, and that's all his handlers have to work with.